Our Book and Film Club will meet today to discuss Dune, both Frank Herbert’s 1965 masterpiece and David Lynch’s 1984… attempt. In preparation for it I watched Dune, for the third time ever, over the weekend.

Every time I fly, I peer out the window and think about “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the short story made into a famous episode of The Twilight Zone about a gremlin on the wing of an airplane tearing apart the engine wiring. Every time I drive on the freeway and a semi fills my rearview mirror, I think of “Duel,” the short story adapted into Steven Spielberg’s first film about the unseen driver of a tanker truck playing cat-and-mouse with a terrified salesman. Every time I shop at Costco, I look at the barred ceiling windows and the stacks of dried goods and think that this would be the place to go when the apocalypse — so rivetingly and despairingly captured in the 1954 novel I Am Legend — finally turns our family and friends into night-stalking ghouls.

An ancient Soviet space station begins to decay in its orbit. Pieces of it re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Fiery meteorites streak the sky. Sonic booms shatter windows. When the carbonised wreckage strikes the Earth, the impact areas are cordoned off amidst fears that the material might be radioactive. But it’s not radiation sickness that emanates from the sanitised zones. Somewhere out there in space a disaster occurred that threatens civilization.

An outburst of interest in commercial fiction in the 1920s led Hodder & Stoughton, then about sixty years old, to develop its ‘Yellow Jacket’ series – smaller format paperback reprints of successful crime and mystery fiction, usually reproducing the superb cover-art for which Hodder was known.

Apologies for the lateness of today’s article, I’ve just this moment stepped off of a train from Edinburgh, where I’ve just spent the most fantastic weekend.

Now, I’ve been regularly visiting the city for the past year or so, and I have completely fallen in love with the place… But not in the way you might expect. The literary history of Edinburgh is well documented, from Ian Rankin to J K Rowling, but I’m talking about its dark side.

So it seems that my rabid enthusiasm for Man of Steel may have been premature and purely influenced by some brilliant trailer editing. So don’t worry – this weekend recommendation steers completely clear of a trailer which sees the ever-heroic Brad Pitt abandoning his family to save the world.

If someone were to ask me what the most fascinating trip of my publishing career has been, I would without hesitation opt for the two days ‘researching’ with Iain Banks, his first wife Annie and photographer Martin Gray on the Hebridean islands of Islay and Jura in March 2003.

We are ‘wondrously’ pleased to announce that we have teamed up with our friends at Brewer’s to bring you the Hodderscape WEDNESDAY WONDER. Each Wednesday we’ll be sharing one of the weird and wonderful gems from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable – we hope you find them as enjoyable as we do!

If there’s one thing we all love doing, it’s talking about books. But plenty of our favourite books wind up being adapted to film – some more than once – and gosh, who doesn’t really love talking about books vs. film?